A Scream in the Boston Public Library

Australian writer Winifred “Freddie” Kincaid has come to Boston after winning the prestigious Sinclair Fellowship, which gives her an apartment in a renovated Back Bay brownstone on Carrington Square while she works on her novel. Looking for inspiration one day, she settles into the Boston Public Library’s Reading Room and begins quietly inventing stories about the three strangers sharing her table.

There is Marigold Anastas, an extensively tattooed Harvard psychology student; Whit Metters, a handsome Harvard Law student; and Cain McLeod, a strikingly attractive and reserved novelist whose work Freddie already knows.

Then a woman screams.

The terrible sound echoes through the library, prompting security to lock down the building while they investigate. Trapped together, Freddie and her three tablemates begin talking, and by the time they are allowed to leave, the frightening interruption has unexpectedly turned four strangers into friends. They head for coffee together, unaware that the scream has connected them to something much more sinister.

The following day, they learn that a young woman named Caroline Palfrey was found murdered inside the library, her body concealed beneath a buffet table in the Chavannes Gallery. Even more unsettlingly, Whit admits that Caroline was not a stranger to him. They had worked together at a local tabloid and arts paper called the Rag.

From that point on, the four friends find themselves increasingly tangled in the murder investigation. Freddie also grows especially close to Cain, and their attraction quickly develops into a romance.

But Freddie’s story is actually a novel being written by another Australian author, Hannah Tigone. Between chapters of Freddie’s story are messages Hannah receives from Leo Johnson, an aspiring Boston writer who has volunteered to check the manuscript’s details for accuracy related to American life. At first Leo seems helpful, but his comments gradually become more intrusive. He wants Hannah to make her story darker, more violent, and more disturbing.

Someone Begins Targeting the Group

The danger inside Hannah’s manuscript escalates when Freddie receives a horrifying phone call. Instead of a voice, she hears a recording of a woman screaming in genuine terror. Freddie believes she is hearing Caroline’s actual scream from the night she died.

Even worse, the call appears to have come from Cain’s phone.

Cain insists he lost his phone on a crowded bus, but someone begins using it to send Freddie ominous photographs. One shows the entrance to Whit’s family home. Another shows Freddie’s own apartment door.

Then Whit is attacked in Back Bay. He is stabbed and his phone is stolen, although strangely, his attacker leaves Whit’s wallet behind. Detectives Justine Dwyer and David Walker begin looking more closely at everyone surrounding Caroline’s murder.

Their investigation exposes one of the group’s own secrets. Marigold admits she has been obsessed with Whit for some time. She has followed him home repeatedly and even followed him to the library on the day Caroline was killed specifically so she could sit opposite him. What initially seemed like a chance meeting between four strangers was therefore not entirely accidental.

Suspicion also begins gathering around Cain.

Marigold discovers that Isaac Harmon, the homeless man Cain has described as saving him when he was a teenager, was actually a fugitive wanted for murder. Soon afterward, another homeless man, Shaun “Boo” Jacobs, confronts Cain beside his Jeep. Calling him “Abel,” Boo demands to know whether Freddie knows what Cain did before smashing a bottle over Cain’s head.

Freddie takes the injured Cain back to her apartment, where their eccentric elderly neighbor Mrs. Weinbaum insists that she is a doctor and stitches his wound. The next morning, lawyers arrive with a liability waiver and reveal the absurd truth: Mrs. Weinbaum was never a physician. She sometimes becomes convinced that she is one and apparently bought her medical supplies online.

That bizarre episode becomes considerably less funny when Boo is soon found dead beside the Charles River with his throat cut.

Cain’s Real Identity

Police bring Freddie in for questioning and reveal what Cain has been hiding. Cain McLeod is actually Abel Manners, a convicted murderer who spent seven years in adult prison for killing his stepfather when he was only fifteen.

Cain finally tells Freddie what happened.

His stepfather was a decorated police officer who violently abused him. One night, the man pinned Cain down and attempted to sexually assault him. Cain had been keeping a knife beneath his pillow for protection and stabbed his stepfather in self-defense. Because the dead man was a respected police officer, Cain’s claim of self-defense was not believed, and he was convicted of first-degree murder.

Boo is also connected to Cain’s prison years. Before addiction destroyed his medical career and left him homeless, Shaun Jacobs had been a surgeon. While Cain was incarcerated, a prison boss forced Boo to stab Cain in the back as punishment, choosing a place where the wound was unlikely to kill him. That attack left one of Cain’s scars.

Despite Cain’s history and the evidence apparently accumulating against him, Freddie believes he is innocent of the current murders.

Outside the manuscript, however, Hannah’s relationship with her own Leo has become far more dangerous than she realizes. Special Agent Michael Smith of the FBI contacts her with alarming news: the man calling himself Leo Johnson is actually Wil Saunders, a dangerous fugitive and suspected serial killer.

The crime-scene photographs Leo has been sending Hannah as “research” are real. Worse, some reached Hannah before details of those murders had been made public.

The FBI and Australian authorities ask Hannah to continue corresponding with him. With help from her lawyer, Peter Kent, Hannah agrees to keep writing and responding normally while investigators try to locate Wil before he realizes that she knows who he really is.

Cain Becomes the Perfect Suspect

Back in Freddie’s story, the evidence against Cain becomes even more damning when Whit’s mother, formidable defense attorney Jean Metters, is viciously attacked in her office. She survives and identifies Cain as the man who assaulted her.

Now wanted by police, Cain goes into hiding. Whit and Marigold become convinced that Freddie has fallen in love with a murderer, but she continues believing Cain has been framed and helps conceal him in an empty Back Bay mansion.

Instead of abandoning him, Freddie starts investigating.

She discovers that Jean Metters has her own hidden connection to Cain. Years earlier, when she still used the name Jean Le Marque, she was the attorney who represented fifteen-year-old Abel Manners at his murder trial.

Freddie then visits Lauren Penfold, Caroline’s former colleague at the Rag, and learns that Caroline and Whit had been secretly working together on a major investigative story before Caroline died.

Another clue comes from Darryl Leonowski, who runs the East Boston soup kitchen where Boo used to play chess. Before his death, Boo had been talking about a girl who screamed and somehow made everyone believe she was dead. He had also suddenly begun turning up with expensive gourmet doughnuts from a shop called Around the Hole.

Freddie recognizes the name. Whit had previously recommended that exact doughnut shop to Marigold.

The evidence finally points not toward Cain, but toward Whit.

Whit’s Entire Scheme Is Exposed

Freddie and Cain rush to the Metters family guesthouse because they believe Marigold may be in danger. They are right. Inside, Whit is holding her at gunpoint.

When Cain appears, Whit shoots him in the chest.

With Cain bleeding badly, Whit finally reveals how Caroline’s murder led to everything that followed.

Caroline had discovered Cain’s real identity and devised a sensational story for the Rag. She wanted to secretly manipulate a convicted murderer and see whether she could provoke him into committing another crime. Whit joined her scheme.

The scream in the Boston Public Library had been staged by Caroline. It was intended to create the dramatic circumstances that would bring Cain together with Whit and the others, allowing Caroline and Whit to manipulate events around him while observing his reactions.

But Caroline became greedy. She decided the story could make her career and threatened to cut Whit out and claim the project entirely for herself. During an argument at the library, Whit lost control and killed her. He hid her body beneath the buffet table, transforming Caroline’s staged murder mystery into a real one.

Unfortunately for Whit, Boo witnessed what happened.

Boo began blackmailing him for money and other luxuries, including the gourmet doughnuts that eventually help Freddie connect him to Whit. When Boo’s demands became too dangerous, Whit murdered him as well, cutting his throat beside the Charles River.

From there, Whit realized Cain was the perfect person to blame. Cain was already a convicted murderer with a secret identity, a violent history, and a connection to Boo. Whit exploited every piece of that history to make him look increasingly guilty.

He even attacked his own mother. Jean’s identification of Cain was another part of the frame-up, designed to ensure that police focused completely on Abel Manners rather than Whit Metters.

Now Whit intends to finish the job. He plans to kill Freddie and Marigold and arrange the scene so that Cain appears responsible for their deaths before dying himself.

Freddie and Marigold refuse to wait for him to execute them. Together they attack Whit and struggle with him long enough for police to arrive. Whit is arrested, while Cain is rushed into emergency surgery.

Two Stories Collide

Cain survives the shooting. At the hospital, Freddie and Marigold sit with his mother as they wait for news about his recovery.

Then, as they prepare to leave, the elevator doors open.

Standing inside is Leo.

The moment deliberately blurs Hannah’s fictional world with the increasingly frightening reality surrounding her. The Leo inspired by Hannah’s correspondent has seemingly stepped directly into Freddie’s story.

The real Wil Saunders, however, never reaches Hannah. Authorities capture him after he travels to Australia, and he is eventually imprisoned in a maximum-security penitentiary.

From prison, Wil sends Hannah one final letter. He wants to know how she ended her novel, but imprisonment has done nothing to diminish his fixation on her. He tells Hannah that he is loyal and patient and remains convinced that, someday, the two of them will finally meet face-to-face.

Hannah has finished writing a murder mystery about a writer who unknowingly becomes entangled with a killer. By the time she finishes it, she has narrowly escaped becoming part of exactly that kind of story herself.